As companies and organizations grow in size, departments internally supporting the business grow as well. IT of course is one that must scale to accommodate business needs. If your department is small, it’s very likely that you know how all the components in your IT infrastructure are configured, what they are, what they do, and so forth. You know not only which servers host what resources, but know about the configuration of users in Active Directory, you may be responsible for provisioning those users, and for setting them up with VPN access, server access, and other actions unrelated to configuring the user in Exchange or giving them a mailbox as well as a login. You may be thinking, “Of course, Clemmer, but doesn’t everyone know about all the elements in a network and how the interrelate with email?”

Well, in larger organizations both operational responsibilities and security policies make the separation of duties for IT staff a reality. What does this mean? Well, the person who manages the firewalls and configures rules to allow email traffic between company sites or business units is very likely not the same email admin who is going to configure the SMTP connector or inter-site replication. The staff member that gets information from human resources and provisions accounts is likely not the same staff member that builds out hardware for servers, or configures desktops or notebooks for the new users. The security staff that manage proxies, load balancers, network anti-virus solutions and other security solutions are not the ones that will perform tuning and regular maintenance to your email servers, in most all cases. If you have backup and storage managed by a separate group in the IT staff, they may or may not know the specifics of backing up an Exchange database or server.

Continue reading Is Separation of Duties in IT a Help or a Hindrance?